State of the race: Advantage, Obama

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.

“Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult.

The Obama and Romney campaigns anticipate little movement in national polls before the first debate on Oct. 3, which both see as the most important day of this campaign. They also see eye to eye on their belief that the election will come down to whether Romney can persuade voters he understands the problems of ordinary people and that his solutions are at least marginally better for turning things around economically.

Where the two camps differ — and differ starkly — is on their theories of the case for navigating the final nine weeks. Romney, armed with more dismal jobs numbers, will run a one-size-fits-all campaign, wrapped around the message that the economy is bad, Obama is to blame and that change of leadership is absolutely essential. The Republican plan rests heavily on Romney’s capacity to bury Obama with negative ads — and reap the benefits of his billionaire backers hitting the president even harder, and more relentlessly. This, more than anything else, alarms the high command in Chicago.

A Democratic official said the other big worry for the Obama campaign is that when you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged.

“Many of them voted for Obama in 2008 and felt good about that vote, and still think Obama’s a good person who really tried hard, but the economy sucks for them,” said the Democratic official, who has access to reams of internal polls and focus groups.

Despite that, Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates. “Romney is not going to win undecided voters 4-to-1,” a senior administration official told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “If you are losing in Ohio by 4 or 5 points and trailing in Colorado by 2 points, if you are trailing in Nevada by 2 or 3 points, you are not going to win in those states.

“There is a small number of undecided voters so you are not going to see tremendous movement out of these conventions, even out of the debates. … [W]e have a small but important lead in battleground states that is a huge problem for the Romney camp. … Ohio needs to be tied, Florida needs to be tied at least.”

Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, said the campaign will draw from “a cavalcade of devastating statistics that indicate where the country is,” including an increased use of food stamps, higher poverty rate, bleak jobs figures and the exploding debt.